Nashville and St. Charles is a relatively sleepy little Uptown intersection that is busy enough to be regulated by traffic lights.

Tourists regularly stop to admire the stately mansions on St. Charles in the adjacent blocks. Joggers and walkers peacefully do their thing on the neutral ground, their main adversary the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, but the rumbling electric motor and the clackety-clack gives them ample warning.

There are always plenty of students waiting for the streetcar or the Nashville bus, messing with each other at the transit stops. The Roman Candy man parks his buggy in that area frequently in the summer seeking shade from one of the ancient oak trees that line both avenues. Christmas season brings some beautiful lighting to many of the homes.

But there is one really quirky thing about this attractive intersection: It attracts something unwanted. There are more knockdowns at Nashville and St. Charles than you see on any Las Vegas boxing card. Only one problem -- it's traffic light standards that are being knocked down, not boxers.

Call it an abbberation, an oddity, an enigma, or a mystery -- but there are about as many days when all six light standards at this intersection are upright and functioning as there are eclipses of the moon.

One day I drove by and it was like some bowler had picked up the 7-10 spare -- two were down, not close to each other. As of this writing, one is gone.

In the past two years, I'd guess -- and this might be very conservative -- a dozen have been hit and toppled over by vehicles and dutifully replaced by the city. Seeing one or two down at the same time doesn't even make me blink. Seeing them all functioning makes me take notice.

So what is it, I asked Nashville resident Richard Montgomery?

"It's bizarre. It's weird. You don't see it at any other intersection," he said -- at least not the frequency.

No you don't.

It's not a monster intersection like Carrollton and Claiborne. It's hardly a speedway. Nashville is narrow and bumpy, not exactly conducive to reckless driving. St. Charles is not exactly the fast lane either. And you can't blame it all on overserved drivers, because there certainly are plenty more moving targets all over the city. But none get tagged like Nashville and St. Charles.

Myra Menville, another Nashville resident, thinks the intersection is not well-lit, and the oaks shroud what lights there are. At one time there was a low limb that blocked the light standard on the narrow Nashville median, making it difficult for drivers to see that light. There were complaints and requests that it be cut, but no action. Finally some action was taken, but not what you'd expect.

Some vehicle knocked down the traffic light on the Uptown river side, and subsequently knocked down that limb, she said. Problem solved. Cost: One more traffic light replacement.

"Motorists come across St. Charles from the north side of Nashville, where there is no neutral ground, and realize -- apparently sometimes too late -- that the south side is not only not directly lined up but it has a very narrow neutral ground where one of the most vulnerable traffic lights is located," said Dr. Ruary O'Connell, another Nashville dweller. "We still have 18-wheelers taking a right turn from St. Charles onto Nashville."

That turn is tough for limos, much less those big rigs.

In the 1830s, that area was owned by one Cornelius Hurst. He named a street for his wife Eleonore and for their children, Arabella and Joseph. Another street was named Hurst, and the fifth he named Nashville. At the time there was a scheme to get a railroad from New Orleans to Nashville, and in an effort to get a terminal in his subdivision, Hurst prematurely named the street after the Tennessee city.

However, as John Chase's classic book about streets, "Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children," points out, the New Orleans-Nashville railroad never reached Nashville, Tenn., or Nashville Street. It, and Hurst, wound up in Brokesville, thanks to the Panic of 1837.

Can this traffic light situation be blamed on a curse from back then?

"I think we're haunted," O'Connell said. "Probably somebody was murdered in one of these houses years ago."

Traffic light revenge from a ghost? Well, it is New Orleans -- stranger things have happened.